Sunday, February 21, 2016

Chicken post of the day

one of the downsides of letting chickens out of cages to wander around:

“This larger, more complex environment permits expression of behaviors not seen in space-limited cages, such as flight.”And so unfortunately, because hens are not very competent at flying there is an inevitable downside – crash landings.A new study in the journal Poultry Science makes progress towards quantifying the numbers of failed landings (which can cause bruising and in some cases broken bones). The first of the flocks under scrutiny crash landed 9.1% of the time, and in flock two a whopping 21% failed. The crashing hens tended to slip over on the ground, bump into others, or misjudge their perches.
See: ‘Failed landings after laying hen flight in a commercial aviary over two flock cycles’